Remember those postings on

Remember those postings on Craig's List, purporting to be from the Social Security Administration and seeking participants for focus groups on Social Security privatization?

It seems like a case of fraud and of a rather serious sort.

This morning we received an email from a reader who had responded to the posting and got back an email explaining how to participate and giving him a form to fill out. On its face, the response and the form looked like about what you'd expect: some boilerplate about what the focus groups would be like and a form asking for various personal and demographic information about the potential participant.

The email was 'signed' by someone claiming to be from the Social Security administration.

Based on this I called the SSA press office early this afternoon. And an hour or so later I received a call back from Mark Lassiter, the press officer. Lassiter told me in no uncertain terms that these focus group postings and emails are "not being done by SSA or anyone working on SSA's behalf."

He went on to say that there are two main issues of concern to them. First, someone appears to be impersonating SSA personnel, which is a crime. Second, the fact that these follow-up emails are being sent out suggests that this is more than just an attempt to spoof SSA but possibly some sort of identity theft scam (the form requests name, birthdate, social security number, etc.)

Lassiter tells TPM that his office has requested that the SSA Inspector General investigate the matter.